Call Me by My Name (17 page)

“Shut up!” he yelled.

Tater went to sit in the front seat, but Charlie LeBlanc made him get in the back. Angie and I started on our bikes for Helen Street, and the cop car followed us. We didn't pedal fast; neither of us was in a hurry to get home. The neighborhood kids had gone inside, and the night was cooler now and you could see more than just clouds in the sky. At the house, the carport light was on and inside a light shone over the kitchen sink. You could see it through the lace in the window. There was no one looking out.

We lay the bikes down in front of the Cameo and walked back to the street and the car idling by the curb. Charlie LeBlanc's window was rolled down, and I could smell cigarette smoke.

“Are you taking him home or to the jail?” Angie said.

“I never thought I'd see the day,” Charlie LeBlanc said. “I mean, I thought I might, but I never thought it would be you, Angie.”

“You're confusing me again, Mr. Charlie.”

“No, I'm not,” he said. He was still looking at Angie when he said, “There aren't any colored girls good enough for you, Tater Henry?”

“We were just in the water talking,” he answered.

“Up North in the big cities they tell me you see the black buck with the white lady like that and nobody pays it any old mind. But we don't live there, do we?”

They'd camped a lot, Pops and Charlie LeBlanc, back when they were boys. I remembered the pictures. Mr. Charlie standing in front of a tent, Pops next to him, holding a string of fish, a fire going with a pan on top. They'd both run off and joined the army after high school. And they'd gone to Korea together, returned home at the same time, and married local girls. Like brothers, they were.

“What's this all about, Angie?” Mr. Charlie asked.

“I don't know what you mean,” she said.

“What is it you see in them? I guess that's the mystery here.”

“The mystery?” she asked.

“I always heard that if a white girl went with a black, it's over for her, and no white will ever touch her again as long as she lives. You ever heard that, Rodney?”

“No, sir.”

“You believe it, though, don't you?”

I didn't say anything.

“But you believe it, don't you, Rodney?”

I still kept quiet. I kept quiet, and Angie wouldn't stop staring at me.

They drove off, and we stood in the yard and watched them all the way up to Dunbar Street. Light from the streetlamps shone through the windshield, and I caught a glimpse of Tater as the car turned left, its headlights sweeping over the houses.

“You're a coward, Rodney,” Angie said in a plain voice, as if it were a fact that finally needed stating.

I followed her inside, and she made enough noise to make certain Mama and Pops knew we were there. They came down the hall in their nightclothes and stood in the middle of the kitchen. Angie was crying, but it wasn't because she was afraid of Pops. She was afraid for Tater, and she kept pleading with Pops to get dressed and drive us downtown to the police station. Instead Pops went to the sink and drank a glass of tap water, then rinsed out the glass and set it upside down on the drain pan to dry. He was in no hurry to do anything, and I could tell now that neither he nor Mama had been sleeping. Next he opened a cabinet door and removed a tin of coffee. He filled the electric pot with water and spooned some grounds into the basket on top.

Mama, meanwhile, had started pulling bacon and eggs out of the refrigerator. Her skillet was already on the stove. She turned a knob and used a match to light one of the burners, then she warmed the skillet over the flame and lay lengths of the bacon across the surface in neat rows.

And the whole time Angie stood there crying and pleading with Pops to do something. Mama slid a chair out from the table and helped her to sit.

By now I understood who had called Charlie LeBlanc. And Angie must've realized it, too. She stopped crying and sat up taller. I offered her some paper napkins to wipe her face, but she pushed it away.

“You called him,” she said to Pops.

He had poured himself some coffee. There was a smile on his face as he brought the cup to his lips.

“You called him!” Angie screamed. “How could you? How could you—”

But Pops threw his cup crashing to the floor and was on top of her before she could say more. Hands on his knees, he brought his face right up to hers and seemed to pin her down in her seat with it. “I will put you out on the street before I let you get away with this, little sister.”

“Get away from me. Rodney . . .
Rodney
, get him away. . . .”

He stood up and waited to see if I had it in me. I couldn't look at either of them.

“I didn't think so,” he said.

The cup lay in pieces on the floor, and coffee was dripping from the bottom cabinets. I thought it was over. But she said quietly, “Rodney,” and started crying again.

Mama came over and positioned herself between them. “Go to the room,” she said. She was talking to Pops. “Go,” she said, trying to keep calm. “Right now. Go to the bedroom.”

I cleaned the floor after he left. I put the pieces from the broken cup in a brown paper bag, and I sopped up the coffee with a sponge. Then I wiped everything with a damp towel.

The house had gone quiet, and Mama started cooking again. She scrambled the eggs in the bacon grease and reheated some leftover biscuits on the stovetop and served them dripping with oleo and cane syrup. It was almost 3:00 a.m. We usually said grace before meals, but we didn't now.

Angie sat without eating. Her shoulders were shaking although her sobs were silent. “Mr. Charlie wouldn't hurt him, would he, Mama?” she said.

“No.”

“He wouldn't, would he?”

And Mama shook her head.

H
e left the house about two hours after we went to bed. My door was open, and I could hear him tell Mama he was going to the lease to hunt rabbits. The lease was some acreage in Acadia Parish where he and a couple of men from the plant had hunting rights. I heard him remove his shotgun and a box of shells from the rack in the living room. I heard him ask Mama if he should wake up Angie and try to talk sense to her. I heard Mama tell him no.

He let the Cameo warm up a long time in the carport, and as soon as he was gone Angie came to my room. “Get up,” she said. “You're coming with me.” She stood over my bed and nudged my shoulder with her knee. “Let's go, Rodney. Rodney, let's go. Don't you need to see for yourself that Tater's okay?”

It was wrong how Pops had treated her, but I could still think of about a hundred guys that I'd have preferred for her to be in love with, every one of them white. I got up and dressed, and minutes later I found myself riding after her down the street.

“Can I start over with you?” she said as we headed down Dunbar toward the bayou.

“You don't have to start over with me, Angie.”

“No, Rodney. That's what you should be asking me—can I forgive you and let you start over? Don't you want to redeem yourself for last night?”

I was never one for public spectacles, so I wasn't pleased when she threw her bike down, ran up on Tater's porch, and started pounding on the door and calling his name. Her voice was desperate again. And I knew she was imagining the worst—Tater hanging by a rope from a tree in the Thistlethwaite Reserve, or Tater bound and thrown from a bridge for animals to dispose of his body.

I kept revisiting the look in Charlie LeBlanc's eyes when he held the light on them in the pool. I wanted to see through to his brain and find what was there, but the exercise didn't get me any closer to the truth. His eyes had probably revealed little more than my own, and I didn't care to consider what that meant.

Angie and I sat on the porch with our legs hanging over the side. She was operating on less sleep than I was, and I had never been so tired.

“Tater,” she called again, throwing her head back to get more volume. “Please, Tater, open the door. Open the door, Tater. Open the door.”

A man stepped out from the house across the street. He was holding a kitten, mewling for food.

“He's in there,” he said, and pointed with the hand holding the cat. “Try the back.”

And now we could feel vibrations in the floorboards, and in that moment we knew he was home and the fear washed away.

“Just let us know you're all right,” Angie said again.

“I'm all right,” he said, answering from the middle part of the house. He was in the bedroom, judging from the distance.

“Did he do anything to you, Tater?”

“No.”

“Are you sure?”

He didn't answer for a minute, then the door creaked open. “Yeah, I'm sure,” he said. He was wearing orange gym shorts from school with a tiger emblem on one leg and the Bigfoot T-shirt I'd given him.

“I'm so sorry,” Angie said. “What did I do? Just tell me you forgive me.”

“Nothing to forgive,” he said. He stepped out onto the porch, and I looked him over for evidence of a beating, but there was none. He waved at the old man across the street, and the man went back inside.

“Y'all really know that guy?” Tater asked. And we knew he was talking about Charlie LeBlanc. “He starts on me again. Then a call comes on his radio—trailer house on the Lewisburg Road is burning. So he stops on Parkview Drive and tells me to get out. He goes, ‘Next time find yourself a nice colored girl to go skinny-dipping with,' and takes off. I walked the rest of the way home.” He looked back through the open door. “Y'all want some cornflakes?”

“I want a hug,” Angie said, and moved closer to him.

He seemed uncertain but still opened his arms, and she started crying again the way she had at home. Holding her in a loose embrace, not sure how to console her, he glanced at me from over her shoulder, and I shook my head.

When you stood next to him and allowed for familiarity again—when you came back around to the understanding that, yes, here was a friend—all the emotion that had led to wild screaming and a cup crashing on the floor began to register as a waste. And as I looked at them standing together in each other's arms, I realized that by trying to stop them, we really had only encouraged them. It was them against us now, and they would win that one every time.

I got on my bike and started pedaling, taking the usual route and taking it slow in case Angie wanted to catch up. It wasn't long before I heard the clattering of her bike as she closed in on me. I went to say something, and she shot right past me, going twice my speed. I stood on the pedals and started pumping harder. I tried to close the gap. She could've slowed down had she wanted to. After a while I let her go and stopped trying.

The school had an awards ceremony in the gymnasium at the end of the year, and seniors were called up to a portable stage and given trophies and certificates for their various accomplishments, if you could call categories such as Best Dressed and Prettiest Eyes accomplishments.

The keynote speaker was a dentist in town who'd recently been crowned champion of a statewide Toastmasters speech competition. Known by his patients as a timid man, the dentist was loud and fearless with a podium in front of him, and kids in the audience who went to him for regular care expressed shock at the intensity of his delivery. The theme of his talk was the importance of pursuing your dreams. He wanted us to dream big. If you dreamed big, he said, there was no telling what you might achieve. You might even surprise yourself and become president of the United States. You might become an astronaut and walk on the moon.

The whole student body was there—seniors in metal folding chairs on the floor and underclassmen in the bleachers. The black kids sitting around me seemed less impressed with the dentist than the white kids did. Some of them were pretending to be asleep. It bothered me that he could look out and see students making an obvious effort to ridicule him. Our school was better than that, and he had a positive message, besides, even if it did assume that the world was a fair place that dealt with everyone equally and really did reward merit no matter who you were.

Tater was sitting next to me in the bleachers. I glanced over at him, and he brought his mouth up to my ear. “First thing I plan to do when I'm president . . . ?” he whispered.

I waited for what promised to be a line loaded with racial content, such as “Free the slaves” or “Call everybody in from the cotton fields.”

Instead he said, “Find out about aliens and UFOs. I always wondered.”

“Then what?”

“Find out if James Earl Ray acted alone. That never seemed right. Same for Lee Harvey Oswald. I'd need to see the secret files on those two. And next I'd want to know the truth about Bigfoot. They have that film of him walking in the woods. Was that real or fake? I'd have the CIA work on it and give me a report.”

At the end of his speech, the dentist locked eyes with somebody in the audience. “Do you want to produce a rock album that lands on top of the charts?” he asked. Now he pointed to another kid. “Do you want to climb Mount Everest, world's tallest peak?” He must've hit twenty others with similar questions. “Do you want to win an Olympic gold medal? Do you want to swim from the tip of Florida to Cuba in shark-infested waters and gain your country's respect and admiration?”

I thought of Coach Cadet, pointing at us the same way and asking if we were turds. Most of the students the dentist was singling out would've been happy to get into trade school or the army. But now he had Cedric Joubert discovering a cure for cancer, when everybody knew that Cedric, who had his challenges, had no future but to pump gas at his dad's Esso station.

The white kids gave the dentist a standing ovation, and I saw Robbie Brown, the white basketball coach who was being sued by his black assistant, rubbing his arms, as if to get rid of gooseflesh. A portion of the black kids—a very small portion, I should say—displayed their approval with tepid applause, but most of them just seemed glad it was over.

“What do you really want to do?” I said to Tater as the dentist was stepping down from the stage.

“When I'm president?”

“No, man. With your life.”

“I want to win state in football,” he said.

“That's it? Win state, and you can die?”

“No. Winning state is first. Winning the national championship in college is second. And winning the Super Bowl as a pro is third.”

“It's good that your ambitions are modest.”

“I don't see why I can't do it. I mean, you take out the end zones, and a football field is but a hundred yards long, right? It's a hundred yards in California and New York, and it's a hundred yards in Louisiana and Alabama and Mississippi. They don't shorten it if you're white, and they don't make it longer if you're black. It's the same for a banker's son like Marco and for a kid like me who never knew his dad. Everybody says change has arrived, and I'm hoping that's true, but right now when I'm out there playing, it's the only time I feel like things are fair.”

What do you say to something like that? If you're me, you say nothing. Or you wait a while and try to come up with a clever reply to make you stop from thinking so much. I waited. “Maybe when football's over you can become a dentist,” I said.

But Tater didn't laugh. He was somewhere else, and I was pretty sure I'd never been there before.

Like everything else at the school, race played a role in who got what at the awards ceremony. The year before, black parents had complained that the school gave almost all the awards to white students. So this year the principal and his staff, aiming to be more racially sensitive, had decided to celebrate a white and a black in each category, and in doing so segregated the student body even more.

There was a Most Likely to Succeed (White) and a Most Likely to Succeed (Black). There also were double winners for Most Beautiful and Most Handsome, but other categories, such as Best Personality and Best Dressed, counted four winners for each because awards went to Black Male, Black Female, White Male, and White Female. The day reached a high point in absurdity when Best Smile was announced. There was a three-way tie among White Females and a two-way tie among Black Males, so the school honored seven people, none of whom seemed very happy to share the award. None of the Best Smile recipients were smiling, in any case, when they were called up to the stage.

Orville Jagneaux claimed the trophy for Most Athletic (White Male). And Most Athletic (Black Male) went to Albert Johnston, a senior long-distance runner who'd been the only athlete in school to win a state title. While Albert had been outstanding, Tater easily was the school's best black athlete. As a starting point guard on the basketball team, he'd averaged eighteen points a game; he was our top sprinter and long jumper in track; and he'd been a major contributor in baseball, hitting a team-high .513 and stealing a school-record twenty-two bases. Students booed when Albert's name was called. Then our side of the gym—the side where the junior class was sitting—struck up a familiar chant.